THE NIGHT OF APRIL 14, 2014

To this day, the events of April 14, 2014, still seem surreal. More questions than answers have emerged from our collective attempts to comprehend both the bare facts and the scope of the catastrophe. Journalists, academics, activists, novelists, and memoirists have penned thousands of pages on the matter. Due to their efforts, and to the first-hand testimonies of the girls and their families and neighbours, we now have a sense of what transpired that night.

A month earlier, in mid-March 2014, a notice had gone out through the churches that the secondary school certificate exams would take place April 2 to April 16 for current and former students of the Northeast Nigerian Government (Girls) Secondary School (GGSS Chibok). A total of 530 candidates registered for the West African Examination Council (WAEC) exams, including former students who had exam resits going as far back as a decade. The current female students at the time, who numbered about 300, were required to board at the school for the duration of the tests. Hundreds of the girls were therefore in the dormitories the night Boko Haram attacked.

Around 10:00 p.m., the girls asleep in the dormitories were jolted awake by the sounds of gunshots, small explosions that signalled that the war had come to them. Boko Haram’s scouts had staked out the premises earlier in the evening. Their plan was to forage for food and to locate and acquire a concrete block-making machine. As most schools in that region had been shut in response to the direct threats from the insurgency, the marauders probably expected to find no more than a few girls in the dormitories, a number that they could ignore. Instead, they found hundreds of them, in their final year of high school.

The attackers radioed back their findings and were ordered to take the girls with them. Having arrived with trucks large enough to accommodate only the food stores and machinery they had come to raid, the insurgents had to sequester more vehicles for their unexpected booty. After hijacking several vehicles, burning the girls’ belongings, and marching them out of the school at gunpoint in the dark, the kidnappers loaded the girls into the backs of trucks and headed into the Sambisa Forest. Along the way, dozens of the girls jumped off the trucks and would be found days later walking back home; fifty-seven of them would eventually return, whilst 219 girls remained captive.

DERELICTION IN THE FACE OF TERROR

When the noise of the gunfire ceased, the Chibok residents who had fled into the surrounding hills began to make their way back to the village and then to the school. By the time they arrived, much of it had already been burnt to the ground. The students were girls from the various communities: Garu, Likama, Shirkarkir, Mbalala, Korongilim, Kuburmbula, Gatamarwa, Kautikari, Askira, and Damboa. Many of their parents had watched helplessly from their villages as the flames engulfed the school. The parents were afraid, as they knew who the intruders were. Some had heard of what had happened at the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi just south of their location in the neighbouring Yobe State, exactly forty-seven days earlier. They had heard of schoolboys marched in line by gunmen to the assembly ground. They had heard of slit throats, burned bodies, and other barbarities. They, too, hurried to Chibok to rescue their daughters, but by the time they arrived, the school was smouldering on the soil. When I think of that night, I still imagine the first smell of smoke the walkers experienced and the torturous remaining miles to its source.